What Is DSQ?

Dietary Screener Questionnaires (DSQ) is a 26-item survey instrument developed by NIH’s National Cancer Instritute (NCI).

• Besides gender and age, it asks about the frequency of food group intake in the past month. Then, using an algorithm developed by NCI, several food group intake amounts can be estimated.

• While its official website provides several versions of the questionaire, we focus on the Self-Administered Questionnaire: Paper version. We attempt to follow the questionaire’s codebook as much as possible. For minor discrepancies between the codebook and the official scoring code, we follow the requirement of the official scoring code.

• The official SAS programs are available on the NIH NCI website. Here we provide a translated R version. Similar to the official scoring methods, here we focus on implementing the current method.

How to Score DSQ?

Before running the scoring code, please ensure the data formatting (variable naming and value encoding) follows our data encoding expectations. Once your data (a data frame named data) is cleaned and formatted, you can run this:

data_scored <- DSQ_Scores(data)

Explanation of the DSQ output can be found at the NCI website.